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Sunday, June 5, 2016

A well-known French magazine was forced to close the online comment section of an article about a new film about anti-Semitism because it was inundated with anti-Semitic statements.

Fifteen minutes after the article about “The Jews” was published Monday on the website of the weekly Marianne, “a flood of hysterical comments” appeared under the text, the author of the article, Martine Gozlan, wrote in an op-ed about the decision to shut down the comments.

The comments were “not only polemical or hostile: Those comment are welcome,” she wrote, “but bare naked hate, crass nonsense, ignorance made of a patchwork of rumors and conspiracy theories.” She added that “the taboo words ‘Israel’ and ‘Jews’ regularly provoke such reactions.”

“But this time, I said enough. Stop the flood. End the fanfare and the comments,” she wrote in a separate article, which also was closed for comments. Calling anti-Semitism a “malignant tumor,” Gozlan wrote that she was no longer prepared to “see it grow, flourish and disfigure Marianne.”